


The Dreaming

by bellatemple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-05
Updated: 2011-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-26 22:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Then there were others when he considered it a personal victory not to pick up a half smoked cigarette from the pavement and light up</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dreaming

John had barely managed to close his eyes when he heard the first creak of the springs in the old fold out couch in the living room. Dean had been sleeping on the thing for weeks, relegated there by Sam's insistance that he was too old to share a room, but this was the first time he'd heard the shaky, battered thing make a sound in the night -- Dean wasn't a restless sleeper. When the springs groaned again, John bit back his own, answering sound, forcing his tired body out of his own bed and shuffling into the living room to see what was up.

It'd been a long night, already, what with the salt-and-burn just after sundown, and the three hours in the ER, helping Dean through his first hunt-related injuries. The kid had been a damned trooper through it all, never complaining despite the battering he'd taken at the hands of the spirit, getting thrown into not one, but _three_ separate gravestones while John dug up and salted and lit the bones of the old school teacher. He'd even come up with their cover story, sitting on the gurney with the doctor shining a penlight into his eyes to check for a concussion. Snuck out late to hang with some friends, he said, wasn't watching properly when he tried to get home before his dad noticed. Ran his bike right into the mailbox.

Sprained wrist and a near-concussion. Nothing serious, nothing that wouldn't heal.

But enough to make Dean's night pretty miserable, by the looks of it.

He was half-curled up on his side, back to the hallway to the bedrooms when John came out to check on him, his hands fisted in the sheets which enveloped the lower half of his body. He twitched once, a soft half-groan, half-sob nearly drowned out by the continuing creak of the old mattress. John gripped the corner of the wall, not certain if he should wake him up. In twelve years on the road, he'd never seen his oldest like this -- Sam was the one with the nightmares, the restless sleeper, the one who kept John and Dean up nights with demands for water, stories, or hugs, and even those had started to fade out as Sam grew older and more confident in himself and the world around him.

So John watched, holding his breath as he waited for the next moan from Dean, and tried to tell himself that at sixteen, the boy was old enough to take care of himself -- had more than proven it, in fact, and took care of John and Sam besides -- and didn't need or want his father waking him up. Then Dean's murmured "Mom", in a voice young and cracking mid-syllable, and John found himself moving forward before he could think about taking the first step.

"Hey, dude." He reached out a hand, then thought better of it -- he had enough trouble with Dean's instincts and knife when he had to wake the boy up for school -- and instead perched carefully on the edge of the old fold-out bed, ass half-hanging off, side pressed against the thin padding of the arm of the couch. "Wake up."

Dean's shoulders tensed in the dark, jerking forward once as a strangled noise sounded in the back of his throat, and then he rolled over, startling John by pressing his face into his father's hip and sobbing again.

John's hand hovered over his son's shoulder. He couldn't do this. He wasn't made for this. And he was so damned lucky that he hadn't had to figure this out until now.

"Dad?"

John turned his head back toward the hallway, spotting Sam standing in silohuette from the dim light of the bathroom. It was too dark to see Sam's expression, but John could picture the lower lip sliding out, the narrowed, still-sleep-addled eyes, just based on the slight rumble in the boy's voice. He felt Dean tense up again against him, body curling tighter around his thigh and hip as though he was trying to hide himself, hide his weakness, from his little brother.

There were days, John reflected, when all of this seemed easy -- not many, mind you, but they existed. Days when fatherhood was the most instinctual thing in the world and just a look at his boys could brighten his whole being. Then there were others when he considered it a personal victory not to pick up a half smoked cigarette from the pavement and light up, despite not having smoked since Mary first told him she was pregnant with Dean.

When it was four o'clock in the morning and he had one son trying not to cry into his hip and the other staring at him like he should be fixing the universe, he knew it was one of those days when a half-smoked, dirty cigarette would be the _least_ of his bad decisions.

"Go back to bed, Sam."

Sam lifted a hand and pushed it through his hair, then nodded with a soft grunt and turned back around. Dean relaxed slightly against John's side, and he let out a breath and finally let his hand fall gently onto Dean's back.

"Hey, kiddo."

Dean grunted softly, not pulling his face from where it was pressed into John's sweatpants. John pressed down with his hand and let it run up and down once, between Dean's shoulder blades.

"Bad dream?"

A pause, a hard snort, and then Dean nodded, still not moving away.

"How's your head?"

Dean hesitated, and John was suddenly on more-certain ground.

"The truth, Dean."

A soft breath, not quite a sigh, and then Dean spoke, his voice still cracking, barely audible with the way it was muffled by his position.

"Hurts."

John nodded and patted Dean carefully on the back, then shifted to rise. He didn't notice that Dean had wrapped his good hand into his t-shirt over his stomach until he realized he was half-dragging the boy with him. He switched his hand from Dean's back to his fingers. "Hey, it's alright. I'll be right back, I'm just going to get your meds." He eased Dean's hand away, feeling his son tense back up as the points of contact between them were broken. The way the cotton of his pants stuck to his hip told John that Dean's attempts not to cry had failed, and he swallowed.

What was he doing to these boys?

It only took him a few moments to get to the bathroom and grab Dean's prescription and a glass of water, but he could hear the boy shifting restlessly on the bed all over again, and when he returned, Dean was curled tight into a ball in the center of the bed, his head stuffed under one of the flat pillows, his braced wrist resting heavily over where his ear must have been. The whole bed shifted and groaned loudly as John climbed in to sit next to him, and Dean rolled again, once more finding his hip with his face and his stomach with his good hand. John caught him before he could get situated and pulled him carefully upright, letting him rest against his chest.

"Come on, dude. Just a couple pills and you'll feel better."

Dean nodded tiredly, not protesting as John slipped one of the large, white pills between his lips and followed it up with the water. Once both were down his throat, he turned his head again, twisting his body slightly to push his nose almost into John's armpit, his good hand coming up to grab John's shirt by the collar, his leg shifting up over John's knee.

Dean hadn't been this clingy since just after Mary died, and John knew the dream, possibly a side effect of the knock to the head and the accompanying pain, was throwing Dean for an incredible loop.

John couldn't blame him. He'd had nights like these, after coming home from the war and for years after, nights when only the presense of another warm body could keep him from feeling like he was going to fly apart. He'd been in his twenties, then, and Mary had been a god-send, never questioning her gruff man's occasional need to cuddle, or the way he'd hide his face against her body the whole time he did so.

The trick was to ride it out. Mary had taught him that. The trick was to make sure he knew he wasn't alone, even if the position was awkward and the bed uncomfortable, even if his son's fingers were catching painfully on his chest hair when they spasmed with a particularly hard-held sob. And the trick was, when it was all over, to let it go like it never happened.

Dean didn't ask for much, in his life. He held Sam and John together every moment of every day, and didn't ask for them to do the same for him. John would let him have this, this one moment of clinging, this hard reaction to the dangerous life that John had chosen for him and Dean had accepted without question, and tomorrow, they'd go on as usual.

A shuffling and a sniff were the only signs John got that Sam hadn't gone back to sleep. He looked up to see him silohuetted again in the hallway, hand on the corner of the wall just as John's had been when he'd first come out.

"Dad?" Sam asked again, and John held back a wince as Dean tensed up all over again, pulling out a few more chest hairs as he did. "Is Dean okay?"

John nodded, though he wasn't sure how much Sam could see in the darkness of the living room. "He's fine. Just having a bad night."

He saw Sam tilt his head, and was just about to order him back to his room again when Sam disappeared on his own. John turned his attention back to Dean only to be startled when Sam suddenly reappeared, this time clutching one of the pillows from his own bed. There wasn't a lot of room left on the sofa-bed, but Sam climbed on, anyway, holding the pillow out to Dean and then leaning over John to tuck it carefully behind him when Dean didn't move to take it. Then Sam fit himself up against John's other side, mirroring his older brother's position, pushing his small fingers under Dean's until the two were holding hands across John's chest. John felt Dean slowly relax, the fine tremors in his body subsiding, his breath evening out from the silent, choked down sobs, and he rubbed his hands gently down both boys' backs and let his head drop to the back of the couch, closing his eyes again.

He was going to be stiff and sore the next morning -- they all would be, sleeping in such a position -- but John couldn't help but think it was worth it. There were nights when it was all he could do not to drown himself in a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes, hiding his face in books the way he'd once hidden it in Mary's hair. There were nights when the heartache of the last twelve years was so bad he wasn't sure how he kept pushing himself forward. And there were nights like these, where he suddenly knew, beyond a doubt, that somehow he was still doing right by these boys.

Nights like these, he suddenly knew that, despite everything, they would all eventually be okay.


End file.
